Lytton Strachey called Forster the "Taupe", or mole, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst pointed out in assessing Wendy Moffat's EM Forster: A New Life in the Daily Telegraph, and "it is hard to make a case for someone who only occasionally popped into view . . . before retreating into a network of secret tunnels". Yet this "superbly illuminating biography" shows that "far from being a solitary burrower, he was part of an underground movement" of homosexual authors, "one of gay liberation's unsung heroes". Peter Ackroyd, in the Times, also admired "an exemplary biography . . . the story of a pilgrimage towards humanity". However, Claire Harman in the London Evening Standard was less impressed by "a highly sympathetic, almost dewy eyed, account of Forster's gayness", observing that he "had an even more closeted secret, virulent misogyny . . . Femininity disgusted him."

"This is the most damning official biography of a British prime minister ever written," Robert Harris noted in the Sunday Times of Philip Ziegler's Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography, which he called an "elegant, compelling and devastating study". The book is "all the more deadly because the author plainly strives to be fair. But Heath's character was so chilly, his behaviour often so astonishingly rude, and his premiership so disastrous, that even Ziegler cannot rescue him." Ziegler "charts an accelerating inventory of solipsism, pomposity, greed, grudges and misjudgment", Craig Brown wrote in the Mail on Sunday. Heath's "voyage through life was uneasy, but it makes his biography as gripping as a tragic novel, with all the comic inevitability of a cautionary tale".

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a "collection of 44 linked short stories, each reinterpreting a scene or episode from the Odyssey", is "a book of intellectual fireworks that also manages to be wonderfully entertaining", Andrew Holgate enthused in the Sunday Times. Simon Goldhill, in the TLS, called it "intelligent, absorbing, wonderfully written, and perhaps the most revelatory prose encounter with Homer since James Joyce". "Even when he falters," said the Scotsman's Adam Mansbach, "Mason's imagination soars and his language delights. He is a writer much like his protagonist: prone to crash landings, but resourceful and eloquent enough to find his way home."

Critics have enjoyed giving Paul Johnson's Brief Lives a caning. "It reveals a little about the many famous people Johnson has met during his life," Roland White wrote in the Sunday Times, "and a lot about its author's astonishing self-regard." "Where would the popes, presidents and princesses of the world be without Paul Johnson?" AN Wilson asked in the Spectator, struck that "from his teenage years, personages whom the rest of us only read about have wanted to be his friend." As well as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Princess Diana, "Pope John XXIII, David Ben-Gurion, General de Gaulle, Nancy Mitford and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon all had the privilege of sitting at his feet". Sardonically praising Johnson's qualities as "an excellent judge of character" with "strong moral antennae", Wilson pounces on his criticism of a friend for name-dropping: "no one could accuse Paul of that 'tiresome propensity' as he calls it".